THE INTERNET Criminals prey on victims desperate for money

Published 4:00 am, Monday, January 18, 2010

Even though online job scams have become more convincing as criminals have honed their skills, sometimes victims don't fall for them - they jump into them.

"Even when they know it's a scam, I've had people say, 'Well yeah, but what if I can make a thousand dollars out of it?' " said Tabatha Marshall, founder of PhishBucket.org and a crusader against these schemes. "People are hurting, and so many are willing to take the risk."

Job scams have plagued the Internet for years, but their numbers have skyrocketed and their victims multiplied along with the economic downturn and a 9.7 percent unemployment rate. Criminals, always striking where people are the most vulnerable and emboldened by law enforcement's troubles in tracking them, went after job seekers with redoubled efforts.

The numbers of scams recorded by PhishBucket.org soared at the beginning of the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008 - a year when the number of scams more than tripled from the year before - and remained at new heights for most of 2009, Marshall said.

So-called money mule schemes represent the majority of the scams. By the end of 2009, Dutch risk management firm E-Secure-IT identified 626 money mule scams, an increase from the 406 detected in 2008.

In those ploys, victims often become unwitting accomplices to international crime by wiring money stolen mostly through computer exploits to scammers overseas. More than just losing their private information and their own assets, victims are often left facing criminal charges.

"People are being charged with fraud and theft even if they didn't know what they were doing. (Authorities) don't know if they can believe that. All they know is that you deposited a check and it looks like it was all you," Marshall said.

How scams work

Online job scams can come in the form of work-at-home schemes, false offers with the logo and product description of a legitimate employer slapped in the body of an e-mail, or fake company Web sites with professional graphics, stock images of smiling executives and even press releases and legal disclaimers.

British nonprofit BobBear.co.uk, which documents online job scams, identified more than 550 fake company Web sites in 2009 - most of them reported from the United States - more than a 50 percent increase from the previous year.

Fake company Web sites can often be recognized because of their spotty grammar or disproportional compensations for easy tasks. But in some cases, scammers have taken the entire design of legitimate organizations, using Web domains with variations of the original company's name.

In others, scammers will imitate a small or medium-size business with a solid reputation and an Internet trail that job seekers doing research can find to assuage any concerns.

Criminals "know people will do research and actually want them to find something," said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum.

Fraudulent job postings have also become a headache for legitimate job sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com and Craigslist. While some consumer advocates question the effectiveness of their methods, in recent years they have taken a range of actions to police their sites.

Craigslist spokeswoman Susan MacTavish Best said that the site employs "a wide array of technological and staff measures to suppress scam attempts" and that those that reach the site "are generally quickly identified and removed by user flagging."

What's being done

Patrick Manzo, head of Monster.com's fraud-detection department, said the company screens all new customers before allowing them to place job ads and uses automated content monitors inspecting the site for inappropriate content.

Online job scams were also on federal authorities' radar last year. In Operation Short Change last summer, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on several mail, phone and online job scams, including Google Money Tree, a work-at-home ploy unrelated to the Internet search company that tricked victims into paying for a startup kit and later began draining $72.21 a month from their accounts.

Often, authorities can do little other than document incidents. Finding culprits can be next to impossible when criminals hide behind a maze of proxy networks and domains across the globe, causing all kinds of jurisdictional complications.

Educating the public

Researchers, law enforcers and advocates alike seem to agree that educating the public to recognize these scams is essential.

Some red flags to look out for are e-mail addresses from free e-mail providers like Gmail or Hotmail instead of a corporate domain contact, requests for up-front fees or scans of driver's licenses and passports, or offers that do not match the job seeker's skills.

"One of my favorite ones: If a company tells you it's 100 percent legal, it's probably not," Marshall said. "Some common sense will work in your favor, too."